Welcome to Lospec, a home for digitally restrictive art. We create online tools for people creating pixel art and other restrictive digital art.
Digitally Restrictive Art
In the early days of computers, memory and storage space were a valuable commodity. Old hardware had very little space, every possible bit had to be conserved. Screen resolutions were small, and could only display a limited amount of colors. Music was stored as a sequence of notes rather than a single audio file. Games and programs had a maximum amount of space they could use, and they had to work within that restriction. Games made for the Atari 2600 could only be 32 kilobytes in total, including graphics, sounds, programming, levels.
Some people might view these restrictions as inconvenient, something that can only hinder your creative process. But there are many benefits to creating art within restrictions. Sometimes they simply help your get over art blocks by giving you a place to start, or help you use a consistent style throughout a piece. They can also force you to think in ways you might not have before and find creative ways to represent your vision. Your goal changes from "how can I best depict this subject" to "how can I best depict this subject within these limitations". You start thinking about the design, and level of detail. You are forced to simplify and prioritize, and consider the piece as a whole. It changes the whole creative process and forces you to think about your art from a new angle. The process of creating pixel art is completely different from even similar art forms like digital painting.
Some artists may impose restrictions upon themselves purposefully just to take advantage of these benefits. Some restrictions are just a result of that art form, like the canvas size of a painting or material of a sculpture. In Digitally Restrictive Art, the restrictions are brought on by the fact that they are stored digitally and is usually based on how the data is saved.
Pixel Art - The most popular digitally restrictive art form, as it was the only option for graphics on early video game systems. Though it's not required any longer, many games today still utilize pixel art due to it's aesthetic appeal, simplicity, and relative ease of creation. A large community of artists and fans still exists around the net.
Voxel Art - A more recent creation which is essentially a 3D version of pixel art. Instead of being made up of squares, it is made up of cubes. It's visuall similarity to pixel art makes it look like something out of the early computing days, but in reality only recently have computers been able to handle voxels.
Ascii Art - Similar to pixel art, but instead of being made up of pixels, everything is made up of ASCII characters, like letters and numbers. Before computers could even display pictures, artists could create images out of text. It was mostly notably adopted by the hacking community for use in text files.
Low-poly 3D - 3D models are typically made up of thousands of polygons, connected at their edges to create 3D shapes. In modern movies and games there are typically so many polygons that you can't see them and they look like a smooth surface. But in the early days of 3d, artists were limited to very few polygons. Low-poly models are still occasionally used in games today for memory restrictions as well as aesthetics. A subset of low-poly 3D includes using pixel art for the textures, adding another layer of restrictions.
Chiptune - Storing audio digitally actually takes quite a bit of space. Rather than reducing the length or quality of a song, early digital composers created a way to store songs as notes, which are then played at specified times, essentially being performed live by the computer. There are many different formats of digitally restrictive music that offer a whole array of different features and sounds. Midi files for example have a preset group of instruments you can assign to each note, and MOD/XM files let you create your own instruments out of waveforms.
This site tries to gather open-source remakes of great old games in one place. If you think that something is missing from the list - please go to our GitHub repository and create an issue or even a pull request!
Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them.
Welcome to Planet eBook, the home of free classic literature! The latest version of the site, with its mobile-friendly design and multi-format eBooks, attempts to make our collection of eBooks available on all devices.
Existing free eBooks on the web tend to be well beneath the quality of paper books, making them more difficult and less pleasurable to read. In a small way, we’re trying to change this. Our goal is to publish a small selection of high-quality eBooks — each a genuine alternative for readers wanting to enjoy reading a book without having to pay for it.
The books we publish in Australia are all in the public domain and out of copyright. Please be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading.
Richard
The tl;dr
We should all be automating our image compression.
Image optimization should be automated. It’s easy to forget, best practices change, and content that doesn’t go through a build pipeline can easily slip. To automate: Use imagemin or libvips for your build process. Many alternatives exist.
Most CDNs (e.g. Akamai) and third-party solutions like Cloudinary, imgix, Fastly’s Image Optimizer, Instart Logic’s SmartVision or ImageOptim API offer comprehensive automated image optimization solutions.
The amount of time you’ll spend reading blog posts and tweaking your configuration is greater than the monthly fee for a service (Cloudinary has a free tier). If you don’t want to outsource this work for cost or latency concerns, the open-source options above are solid. Projects like Imageflow or Thumbor enable self-hosted alternatives.
How does our understanding of technology change when abstractions become tangible? In this course, paper acts as a bridge between code, mathematics, and our human sensory experience of the world.
When we fold, we imbue an inert material with pattern, structure, animation, function, and interface; a crease in paper is a re-programming of the material’s memory. Folded structures give us a means to touch and manipulate difficult problems and unlike simple machines (limited by static friction), folding systems can be applied at any scale, from nanometer to spacecraft scale. With an increased knowledge of folding mechanisms can we build more sustainable, ecologically-aware technology?
Lead by paper engineer and designer Kelli Anderson and origami artist and developer Robby Kraft, SFPC’s two-week session will explore the wide variety of ways that a piece of paper can produce function.
My goal is to include scripts from indigenous and minority cultures who are in danger of losing their sense of history, identity and purpose and who are trying to protect, preserve and/or revive their writing system as a way of reconnecting to their past, their dignity, their sense of a way ahead.
A traditional script is a visual reminder of a people’s identity — as we can tell by the number of cultures that continue to use their script as an emblem (on printed invitations, on shop fronts, even on the national flag) long after most people have stopped using it for everyday purposes.
Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.
That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.
A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.
And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.
But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.
»Conserve the sound« is an online museum for vanishing and endangered sounds. The sound of a dial telephone, a walkman, a analog typewriter, a pay phone, a 56k modem, a nuclear power plant or even a cell phone keypad are partially already gone or are about to disappear from our daily life.
Accompanying the archive people are interviewed and give an insight in to the world of disappearing sounds.
The Low-tech Lab is a collaborative research and documentation project aiming to share and promote low technologies. The programme's vocation is to spread local and efficient low-tech solutions widely in order to provide a global answer to the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations.
This programme is open to any person or structure willing to contribute to low-tech innovation or benefit from its discoveries.
The ArchiveTeam Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive — and it’s really easy to do!
The warrior is a virtual machine, so there is no risk to your computer. The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space.
The warrior runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. You’ll need VirtualBox (recommended), VMware or a similar program to run the virtual machine.
Un bref résumé pour chaque jeu, des étiquettes pour identifier chaque style, genre, thème.
L’idée n’est pas de faire une critique de chaque jeu, juste de te permettre de guider tes lectures et tes choix en fonction de ce que tu recherches.
Sustainability practitioners have long relied on images to display relationships in complex adaptive systems on various scales and across different domains. These images facilitate communication, learning, collaboration and evaluation as they contribute to shared understanding of systemic processes. This research addresses the need for images that are widely understood across different fields and sectors for researchers, policy makers, design practitioners and evaluators with varying degrees of familiarity with the complexity sciences. The research identifies, defines and illustrates 16 key features of complex systems and contributes to an evolving visual language of complexity. Ultimately the work supports learning as a basis for informed decision-making at CECAN (Centre for the Evalutation of Complexity Across the Nexus) and other communities engaged with the analysis of complex problems.
This is (almost) everything I learned in design school in one website. Getting a design degree is not a waste of time. In fact, it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. However, most people aren't as lucky to have the sort of professors I did. Some people don't have the access, the ability, or the time to go to school for this stuff. And frankly, that 10-week design intensive is not going to make you a fantastic designer right out of the gate. You need something more.
You have to be self-sufficient. You have to be hungry to learn.
That's why this website exists. This is a list of everything I've found useful in my journey of learning design, and an ongoing list of things I think you should read. This is for budding UX, UI, Interaction, or whatever other title designers.
english : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
Cette liste des listes rassemble des liens vers des pages qui consistent en une liste ou qui comportent une liste.
processing_cheat_sheet_english.pdf
Thoroughly updated, this fourth edition focuses on modern techniques used to generate synthetic three-dimensional images in a fraction of a second. With the advent of programmable shaders, a wide variety of new algorithms have arisen and evolved over the past few years. This edition discusses current, practical rendering methods used in games and other applications. It also presents a solid theoretical framework and relevant mathematics for the field of interactive computer graphics, all in an approachable style. New to this edition: new chapter on VR and AR as well
Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825–1893), himself an accomplished artist, is best known today for publishing two major pictorial works on the history of design — Le costume historique and L’Ornement polychrome — while engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. Published in ten instalments between 1869 and 1873, the first iteration of L’Ornement polychrome (Colour ornament) is a visual record in 100 plates of the decorative arts from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The work was such a huge success that in 1885–7 Racinet brought out a second series, this time of 120 plates, and updated to include designs of the nineteenth century as well. The imagery presented in both series is drawn from a wide array of various mediums, including woodwork, metalwork, architecture, textiles, painting, and pottery, and from cultures all over the world.
Although based on past masterpieces of design, the fantastic reproductions in L’Ornement polychrome, carried out by a number of skilled commercial artists of the day, can be considered works of art in their own right. Indeed, for Racinet, the purpose of such a compilation of past design excellence was not only to celebrate the masters of the past but also to inspire an improvement of decorative arts in his own day and age.
The images featured here come from an excellent set of scans by RawPixel from their own 1888 edition of the first series. You can also leaf through the work in book form (again the first series) over at the New York Public Library.
What is Open Library?
Our goal is to provide a page on the web for every book ever published.
At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy.
RACHEL is a portable plug-and-play server which stores educational websites and makes that content available over any local (offline) wireless connection. RACHEL makes deploying a library of digital content as easy as pushing a button.
Then simply turn it on. While RACHEL is on, take your device and connect to "RACHEL" as you would any wifi network. Then open a web browser and type the web address (a number listed on the front sticker of your RACHEL).
Once you're connected to RACHEL, you can instantly access offline versions of the world's best free educational websites including Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and over 100 more.
Demo :
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64EN_4.0/
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64FR_3.0/
http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64ES_3.0/
Build your own here : http://rachelfriends.org/rachel-pi-howto.html
Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville uses the phonautogram to record the human voice by tracing sound waves on smoke-blackened paper or glass. The resulting tracings could not be played back at the time, but in 2008 several tracings from 1860 were processed as digital audio files and successfully played back (1853)
Welcome to SampleRadar, the hub page for MusicRadar's regular giveaway of pro-quality, royalty-free samples. Here you can find links to all of our entries, which feature collections of loops, hits and multisamples in a wide range of genres. And the great news is that you won't have to pay a penny to download any of them.
The samples are supplied as WAV files so can be imported directly into your DAW of choice. Because they're royalty-free, you're welcome to use them in your music in any way you like - all we ask is that you don't re-distribute them.
An Archive of 10,000 Cylinder Recordings Readied for the Spotify Era. The UCSB Library invites you to discover and listen to its online archive of cylinder recordings.
The Gallery of Concept Visualization features projects which use pictures to communicate complex and difficult ideas (not just data).
MSLP stands for International Music Score Library Project. The logo is a capital letter A, taken from the very first press-printed book of polyphonic music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, published in 1501. Its printer, Ottaviano Petrucci, is this library's namesake.
https://gist.github.com/nickloewen/10565777
This is a plain-text version of Bret Victor’s reading list.
We are the best site for downloading FREE public domain Golden Age Comics. All files here have been researched by our staff and users to make sure they are copyright free and in the public domain. To start downloading just register an account and enjoy these great comic books. We do not charge per download and the goal of the project is to archive these comic books online and make them widely available.
This library of arts and music videos features This or That (a burlesque game show), the Coffee House TV arts program, punk bands from Punkcast and live performances from Groove TV. Many of these movies are available for free download.
Total Recut provides online resources and social networking opportunities for fans and creators of video recuts, remixes and mash-ups. Users can watch videos or showcase their own work in the galleries, download copyright free source material to use in their own remix projects, learn about remix culture and copyright issues, undertake instructional video tutorials and enter contests to win prizes or just for fun.
Video recuts are short videos, usually found online, that remix found footage from various sources in new ways to create different interpretations and alternative meanings. The facilities and resources on this site are implemented utilising a wiki social network environment whereby registered users can add to and modify almost all content on the site e.g. submit videos to the galleries, rate, comment, update details, flag inappropriate content. Video recuts have become extremely popular on the web since video sharing networks like YouTube gave people the ability to broadcast their work to a potentially large audience for free.
Total Recut is a one stop shop for all things remixed. Users can browse, search and watch the latest recuts, enter competitions to win prizes and acclaim, use online video tutorials to improve their remixing skills, find out about and contact other remix artists and download copyright-free source material to use in their own work.
Reverting to traditional handicrafts is one way to sabotage the throwaway society. In this article, we discuss another possibility: the design of modular consumer products, whose parts and components could be re-used for the design of other products.
Initiatives like OpenStructures, Grid Beam, and Contraptor combine the modularity of systems like LEGO, Meccano and Erector with the collaborative power of digital success stories like Wikipedia, Linux or WordPress.
An economy based on the concept of re-use would not only bring important advantages in terms of sustainability, but would also save consumers money, speed up innovation, and take manufacturing out of the hands of multinationals.
The Macaulay Library is the world's largest and oldest scientific archive of biodiversity audio and video recordings. Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts.
Le catalogue nos livres recense les livres électroniques du domaine public français, disponibles gratuitement et qui ont un minimum de qualité. Les sites suivant sont recensés : Bibliothèque électronique du Québec (BEQ) Bibliothèque numérique romande (BNR) Bibliothèque Russe et Slave (BRS) Ebooks Libres et Gratuits (ELG) ÉFÉLÉ Gallica La bibliothèque de Gloubik Projet Gutenberg (livres en français)
Le portail NetProjets a pour objectif de valoriser et de mutualiser les pratiques numériques dans les domaines de la culture, de la jeunesse, de l’éducation et du social. Il propose une base de données regroupant des fiches synthétiques de présentation de projets ou d’activités, menés avec des outils multimédia, en ligne et hors ligne, à destination du grand public.
The EUscreen project aims to promote the use of television content to explore Europe's rich and diverse cultural history. It will create access to over 30,000 items of programme content and information, and by developing a number of interactive functionalities and dynamic links with Europeana it will prove valuable to the widest range of cultural, educational and recreational users.
Essential information on home construction, electricity production, trees, farming, livestock and more.
An openFrameworks workshop will take place at CoLab at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), New Zealand this Thursday (January, 27th, 2011 @16:00h).
A directory of extensions and libraries for the OpenFrameworks creative coding toolkit.
Compiled fresh from Github daily.
See freshest addons!
The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). We catalog useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants.
Crane.tv is the premium online video magazine for contemporary culture. Devised by an experienced editorial team, its content is aimed at a digital audience of style conscious and culturally curious, global citizens. To date, Crane.tv offers a selection of 500+ videos, showcasing the latest and the best on its five magazine channels - Art, Design, Fashion, Lifestyle and Travel. An international editorial team of leading video-makers and lifestyle-scouts produces the high-calibre content, featuring new talents.
An online resource covering the cultural scene in Berlin, it offers information on gallery openings, exhibition reviews, articles, interviews, artist studio visits, etc. It also offers useful links on artist residencies, studio rentals and international o
